Exclusive | Motilal Oswal opens up on succession, 10X profit goal and his 39-year partnership with Raamdeo Agrawal

Billionaires Motilal Oswal and Raamdeo Agrawal are targeting a tenfold profit increase at Motilal Oswal Financial Services (MOFSL) over the next decade, while preparing the next generation for leadership and giving senior professionals a bigger role in the Rs 60,000 crore group’s future.

In a wide-ranging exclusive interview with ET Markets, the 64-year-old Oswal laid out how his 38-year-old son Pratik Oswal and Raamdeo’s son Vaibhav Agrawal, 37, have moved onto the group's board, alongside a broader plan that treats Group Managing Director Navin Agarwal as effectively equivalent to a promoter, even though he is a professional rather than a family member.

Motilal Oswal’s succession plan

"They report to their respective CEOs," Oswal said. "We've inducted them onto the board because succession is very important — so they are now part of the main board, learning what's happening and how. That's part of our succession plan."


But Oswal was careful to note that family involvement does not necessarily mean family control going forward. "That will depend on them, on how they choose to shape it," he said. "They may decide they don't want an active role, or that they want to be active — the way we were active earlier in the business. It's their choice — whether to hand over 100% or to stay a 'playing captain' rather than just a captain. Both are playing captains."

Pratik now heads the passive and quant funds business at Motilal Oswal Asset Management while Vaibhav oversees assets of over ₹36,000 crore across the alternate investment and PMS platform of the AMC.

The plan also elevates Navin, who Oswal confirmed has earned founder-like status through talent and equity rather than bloodline. "He's held around 5-6% of the company through ESOPs and so on, and he's the third-largest shareholder," Oswal said. "It's not that we owe it to him, he's earned it. He joined as head of research, then built the institutional business, then the AMC business. He now has a large team, and everyone supports him."

Oswal added that the firm's board currently has 4-5 family members and 4 professionals, with Naveen among them, and framed the arrangement as central to how the company is run: "We don't see a difference between ownership and professionalism; everyone is expected to work like a professional and play whatever role they can, add whatever value they can. That's what the companies want."

The 10x target and how he plans to get there

Oswal was explicit about the scale of his ambition for the next decade. "We've grown profit at roughly 33% annually over the last 10 years — about 15x growth," he said. "Our target going forward is 25% annual growth, which would still deliver roughly 10x profit growth over the next 10 years."

He tied that growth to a broader structural bet on Indian financial markets outpacing the economy. "Financial markets tend to grow faster than the broader economy, roughly 1.5x to 2x nominal GDP growth historically, so the underlying tailwind is strong," he said. "Over the last 10 years, Nifty's earnings have grown around 12–13% while our profit growth has been around 26–27%, roughly double the index. We expect that gap to continue over the next 15–20 years."

In FY26, MOFSL reported revenue of Rs 9,416 crore and a profit of Rs 1,869 crore. In the last 20 years, revenue has grown by a CAGR OF 24% and PAT at 28%.

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Drawing inspiration from Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway, MOFSL has quietly built a ₹9,400-crore treasury engine. The treasury book has compounded at a rate of 40% annually since FY14, driven by healthy internal rates of return and the continuous reinvestment of operating profits.

Berkshire Hathaway operates as a decentralised holding company, using capital generated by its businesses, particularly insurance, to acquire and retain high-quality assets for the long term. MOFSL has adapted elements of that playbook by channelling profits from its operating businesses into treasury investments, which in turn support the group’s future growth.

The firm now spans seven business lines — retail broking, institutional broking, asset management, wealth management, private equity, investment banking and housing finance — each run by its own CEO. It has raised roughly ₹1,000 crore in private equity for unlisted companies over the past decade, and from 1994 to roughly 1997–98, Oswal said, it was "essentially the primary broker serving FIIs in India, before global firms entered that space."

The firm now manages or advises close to ₹7 lakh crore in assets, Oswal said, adding that it has "deliberately avoided high-risk situations or controversy" and built its brand "independently," without backing from a large industrial group.

With roughly 12,500–13,000 employees, Oswal said the firm is building "ownership, equity, and profit-linked compensation structures for CEOs and senior people," alongside a roughly 20-acre internal training academy dedicated to staff.

Motilal also plans to own rather than rent office space in every major city it operates in, with towers already running in cities including Bangalore and Ahmedabad. "The idea isn't to build a real-estate asset to monetize, but to build trust with both employees and customers by having a permanent, owned presence," he said. The firm also brought in a global AI head two and a half years ago to build AI capability across the group.

On rising competition, Oswal argued the addressable market is expanding fast enough to support multiple players. "The pie itself is growing, so there's room for multiple players with a genuine value proposition," he said. "The real question is whether we can keep growing faster than the competition, not just faster than the market."

Motilal and Raamdeo: A 39-year partnership that started on a bike

Oswal's account of how the firm began centers on a chance friendship with Raamdeo Agrawal, forged not in the classroom but on the ride home from BSE. Both men had lived in the same hostel years earlier as CA students without meeting; they connected only after Oswal began hitching rides on Agrawal's bike while returning from home.

"I thought I'd get a free ride as well as free knowledge about the market from him — and that he might help me find a good broker for my brothers who were in the equity market business at that time," Oswal recalled.

The two "first met properly around 1986 and started the business together in 1987," according to Oswal, who said neither anticipated how large the firm would become. The partnership was informal for years by necessity: BSE rules at the time allowed only individuals, not partnerships, to hold exchange membership, and the card was issued in Oswal's name. Agrawal described himself as "a consultant to the firm" for roughly five to six years as a result — what he called an effective, if unofficial, partnership.

The firm's name traces to that same constraint. "We incorporated it in 1996," Agrawal recalled. "At that time, Motilal told me — 'If you want to change the name, change it now, it's the last chance.' I didn't want to make it something like "Motilal Raamdeo" — it didn't matter much to me to add my name to the firm, so I let it be." Ownership was eventually formalized as 50-50 after the firm's NSE and BSE entities were merged following NSE's introduction of corporate membership in 1994.

Asked how the two complement each other after nearly four decades, Oswal said the basic division of labor has held even as the firm has scaled: "I focused on the business side; he focused on research and advising clients. Today he's moved from direct client advisory into more research and large client relationships, while I run the overall business day to day."

Agrawal, for his part, traced the trust between them to having started with nothing. "At that time, we had nothing in our pockets, so we had nothing to lose," he said. "For example, if you are in a hostel, you trust others."

Oswal called the two men's respective strengths complementary rather than overlapping: "We respect and value each other's contributions. We both make mistakes, and there are tiring stretches, but at the end of the day the shared priority is the company's growth."

The clearest measure of their 39-year partnership may be where Oswal entrusts his own money: “Raamdeo handles my personal portfolio.”